Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday January 01, 2013 @12:41PM
from the 3-more-years-until-they-hit-a-hectoyear dept.

EagleHasLanded writes "The U.S. Metric Association has been advocating for metrication since 1916 – without much success. In the mid-1970s, the U.S. government passed the Metric Conversion Act, but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone. Or could U.S. educators and health & safety advocates put this issue back on Congress' radar screen?"

It's an interesting article, but having been to China, people talk distances between locations in km, and the weights in the market are in grams. China is SI, even if China still officially recognizes ancient measures. Have you, in your Chinese travels, ever seen anything that wasn't measured in SI units?

Slashdot. The only site where Wikipedia trumps reality (at least the OP posted it tongue in cheek).

Every country has traditional units. China, like Europe, uses metric in almost all engineering, building, legislation. You might buy vegetables in a street market in traditional units, though that's fast fading, but in the supermarket all the packages are marked in litres and grams. The road signs are in km. Your weight is in kgs.Your height in cm.

The US is officially Metric, right? You can't buy anything in a supermarket that's not marked with grams or milliliters.

Having metric marked as an alternative measurement is not being truly metric. For example, in the UK we used to get milk in pints. For a while after metrication 4 pint jugs were marked additionally as 1.89 Litres. The final step was selling them in 2 Litre containers. It's only then that they were truly selling them in metric units.

Temperatures in weather reports are given in F only

It gets worse before it gets better. For a while we had cold weather in C and hot weather in F. As in "The temperature got below zero last night. Not like when we were on holiday and 90 degrees in the shade!"

Although a number of variants of the metric system emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term is now often used as a synonym for "SI" or the "International System of Units" - the official system of measurement in almost every country in the world.

A decimal system of weights and measures based on the meter and on the kilogram

kg are not a unit of weight. Newton is the unit of weight in SI.

You don't even use the correct SI units. Again Metric is not SI.

Darned if I'm going to let you out-pedant me. Just because a system of weights and measures is based on the meter and kilogram doesn't actually say the the kilogram itself is the measure of weight, just the basis for the measure of weight. So there!

No, the kilogram is used for mass. It is often frequently incorrectly claimed to be a weight by people who don't know any better. This works only because at the moment all but a tiny handful of humans are currently limited to an environment where the gravitational field is the same magnitude. If that ever changes people will end up having to learn the difference.

Here in Australia everything is in milllimetres in construction, to the point where if somebody asks you how deep you want that concrete slab and you answer "1254" then that is understood to be 1.254 metres of concrete.

Nobody. You'd think of it as 0.25 mm, wonder about the dimwit who didn't use an appropriate unit of measure, and/or why the hell someone believed that micrometer accuracy was necessary on a construction site.

1 mm is roughly 1/32 Inches - so right off the bat there you've got have the accuracy that you asked for.

Furthermore, it is possible to have decimal millimetres, whilst most construction units are given in mm (eg, a kitchen cabinet is generally 600mm wide, light switches are usually 1500mm above the floor) if you need more accuracy (and you generally don't in construction) then you can specify additional accuracy using decimal places... That's the whole point of the metric system, that using decimal places becomes easy. 1 metre = 100 cm, 10 cm = 0.1 m = 100 mm etc...

If you need to put something in the middle of two points that are, say, 105 mm apart, it's pretty straightforward to specify that the distance is 52.5 mmRulers will often have 0.5 mm markings (again, roughly, 1/64 inch) for the first 50 or 100 mm. If your measure doesn't have half mm markings, it's usually accurate enough to interpolate by eye and put the mark on your materials half-way between two mm marks on the measurement device.

As someone who is 5'2" in your imperial measurement system, I wouldn't fancy specifying construction measurements in arm spans or paces for someone else who is likely to be taller than I to build.

That said, I know my hand span is 150mm from the tip of my thumb to the tip of my little finger. And a 'stretched' pace is 1m. I used to work in the building industry and had to be able to estimate the size of things by eye.

It's better than that -- there are powerful special interests in the US, like the construction supplies industry, which benefits from using measures and sizes different to everyone else in the world. It effectively acts as a trade barrier against the Chinese.

Huh, why is there so much Chinese construction crap in the yards these days (I use the term 'crap' on purpose')? They have long figured out how to make export only items and size them, finish them, etc. specifically for the market.

We have Chinese 'gypsum board', ABS pipe, EMT and a plastic stuff up the toilet drain. About the only thing I've seen that has never been Chinese is dimensional lumber and I expect that it's simply not economical to ship stuff like that over.

like the construction supplies industry, which benefits from using measures and sizes different to everyone else in the world.

Having to deal with multiple measurement systems is nothing but a cost with no benefit - which is why metric is not commonly used here in the US. There is a HUGE cost to switching which is why it hasn't been done but there is no actual advantage to having more than one measurement system to the construction industry or any other industry. Furthermore all the skilled trade workers are trained in imperial units and don't use metric much and there is a lot of resistance from them since they'd have to re-learn a lot of how they do things.

It effectively acts as a trade barrier against the Chinese.

I assure you it does not. All those commodity bolts, fasteners, etc are made in China. Construction companies are often Chinese.

These past two to three years congress seemed like it couldn't agree on neither the weather nor further funding of the US even if you put a gun to their head. But a vote that increases their dick size seems just to be something even the Teabaggers are actually quite desperate for. Even the women.

Are the Colonies really still using Imperial units? - thought they must have stopped doing that yonks ago, after losing all those space probes to erroneous conversions between foot-slug-poundals and furlongs-per-fortnight.

Or is it like their refusal to use global standard paper sizes, or basically follow any other international standards - if it was invented in Europe it must de facto be Communist and therefore can't be touched with a barge pole?

What do you mean "unfortunately"? I'm British and I love metric. Fuck imperial units. I like doing things in powers of ten. It's only a shame we can't get measuring distances in km and speeds in km/h. I for one would be happy to make that switch.

It was planned to happen decades ago, unfortunately the whole metrication thing ground to a halt and we're stuck using pints for beer, miles and yards for road signs, even though these units aren't taught in schools any more (by the time I was at school, education was entirely metric. Sure you come across the imperial units still, but no one has been taught how to make calculations in them for decades.)

Also annoying is the car industry's continuance to quote fuel consumption in miles per gallon, even thoug

I come across this when calculating how much fuel to put in an aeroplane - the bowser dispenses litres, I need to know what that is in pounds for the weight and balance calculation, and the fuel burn (and thus how much fuel I need) is specified in the POH in gallons per hour...... but these are indeed American gallons, not Imperial ones, and getting that sort of thing wrong can kill people.

I come across this when calculating how much fuel to put in an aeroplane - the bowser dispenses litres, I need to know what that is in pounds for the weight and balance calculation, and the fuel burn (and thus how much fuel I need) is specified in the POH in gallons per hour...... but these are indeed American gallons, not Imperial ones, and getting that sort of thing wrong can kill people.

Well that makes my example of a quiche baked from an English cookbook turning out kind of dry seem rather trivial in comparison.

No, we here in the Colonies aren't using the Imperial system. The Imperial system was standardized in the early 19th century. We aren't that up to date. We use a variation of the British system that preceded the Imperial system. For instance, the Imperial system uses a gallon that was defined in 1824, while the US gallon is the Queen Anne's Wine Gallon of 1707.

Decimal units were actually put into practice first in the US, thanks to Thomas Jefferson who was an ardent proponent of the idea.

He was successful in giving the US had the first decimal currency in the world, and later proposed decimalization of the units of measure.

"to reduce every branch to the same decimal ratio already established for the coin, and thus bring the calculation of the principal affairs of life within the arithmetic of every man who can multiply and divide plain numbers." -Thomas Jefferson

The French picked up the idea when Franklin and Jefferson promoted the idea while in France as ambassadors.

The problem was (like in many things) Congress didn't cotton to a good idea and failed to adopt it when Jefferson proposed it after the adoption of the Constitution.

Jefferson actually advocated the measures be based on the motion of a pendulum at 38 degrees, something that predated the definition of units in the metric system in physical units by almost 200 years.

That's OK, I don't think I've ever seen an A4 sheet of paper. In fact, I can't even tell you its dimensions. I know a piece of Letter paper, which is what I would use to write a letter (if such things still exist), is 8.5"x11". Maybe it's not nice round numbers, but it's 2 significant figures (like all ANSI paper sizes), easy to remember, and can be measured with any ruler.

The ISO paper sizes, OTOH, are completely irrational. And I say that because they're based on the square root of 2, which unfortunately is not a rational number. So you end up with an A4 size of 210mmx297mm. Of course if I don't remember that, I can always just calculate it if I remember the formula: An A0 sheet of paper is a square meter with a 1:1.414 aspect ratio, so its dimensions are the 4th root of 2 by the 4th root of 2 divided by the square root of 2 (2^(1/4) x 2^(1/4)/2^(1/5)). I don't need a calculator to tell you that's 1.189mx0.x841m. Then you just fold it in half 4 times and round down, so you get 2^(1/4) / 4 * 1000 = 297mm by 2^(1/4) / 2^(1/2) / 4 * 1000 = 210mm. See? Easy as pi!

Yes, far more easily. See, when I cut or fold my A4, I get an A5. And I cut or fold that again, and get A6. Then A7. All the same shape, with no bits and pieces leftover to be cut off. So I end up with 16 nice wipes of A8 and no shit on my hands.

Ths slashdot summary doesn't seem to be based closely on the linked articles:

but now it seems the time for complete conversion has come and gone.

The linked articles don't discuss a "cold turkey" government-mandated switch to metric (which was never a realistic possibility given the nature of American culture and politics). They discuss incremental government-mandated measures. Some of these measures have already been carried out: requiring food labeling to be in both US and metric. Some have been stalled legislatively: eliminating the US units from food labeling.

It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.

These incremental measures would be incredibly easy, and would require no new taxes or increase in government regulation (just changes to existing regulations). That's why it's so pathetic that the pace of implementing these measures has been so slow.

I teach physics at a community college. My students are a bell curve, extending from folks who are very bright and will transfer to elite four-year schools, all the way down to people who really shouldn't be in college. The bottom half of this bell curve is probably pretty representative of the population of the US.

Some characteristics of people in this range: (1) They tend not to understand at the conceptual level what the operations of multiplication and division are about. (2) They tend not to have any habit of checking whether their answers make sense in order of magnitude. (3) When they learn some new mathematical concept, they memorize it as a rote procedure, and therefore when they don't use it for a month, they forget it completely.

My students are mostly science majors, so they end up developing some facility with the metric system, but it's an uphill climb. For most people, what happens is that they learn the metric system in grade school, and then they never use it in everyday life, so they forget it completely and utterly.

It would be great if we could get road signs to be switched over to dual units. E.g., congress could pass a law saying that on the interstate system, any time an old sign is replaced with a new one, it has to have dual units.

When they tried pricing gasoline in liters at the pump in the 70's, folks were convinced that it was just a big scam to jack up the prices. They were probably right. And in the 70's we were going through the OPEC crisis, as well. That didn't help.

The same thing happened in Europe with the introduction of the Euro. Folks perceived everything as being more expensive.

If these folks want the metric system in the US to succeed, they had better think up a good solution for this problem.

The same thing happened in Europe with the introduction of the Euro. Folks perceived everything as being more expensive.

It was not just a perception, things actually got a lot more expensive. For example, in Germany, the conversion rate was 1.95 DM to 1 Euro, but nominal prices remained approximately the same. Something that used to cost 5 DM suddenly cost 5 Euro. Of course, it was a 100% price hike. That's why they call Euro "Teuro", short for "Expensivo."

I had to equip my shop, and among other things picked up a set of socket wrenches, in both SAE and metric sizes. One thing I noticed, though, was that the socket drives were all in English measurements (1/4", 3/8", 1/2", 3/4") and that there were no metric-drive sets around anywhere. Just curious, are there any metric drive standards in Europe, and why haven't they found their way to the US? I'd expect at least some metric size sets from China to sneak in...

Note to mods: He's talking about the square socket drive (from, e.g. the ratchet handle), not the size of the socket wrenches themselves.

Just curious, are there any metric drive standards in Europe, and why haven't they found their way to the US?

They're already here because they are the same. They are 6.35mm (1/4"), 9.5mm (3/8"), and 12.7mm (1/2").

There would be absolutely no upside to fragmentation in this standard (the only point of which is interchangeability). If you think the point of the metric system is to have everything in some integer measurement, then you're converting for the wrong reason.

I had a brake line go bad on my Ford pickup. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I went the part store, they don't make brake lines as absurdly as they did twenty years ago. I had to buy and hack together two different lines, because one end was sized metric and the other SAE. I normally do not mind SAE at all--the measurements come more naturally because I use them in everyday life (whether that's 3 ounces at a time or in pints!). But it gets a bit absurd when a single car part has different standards.

A few years ago I was driving on a road somewhere south of Raleigh NC (route 1 somewhere between Raleigh and Southern Pines ) and my jaw dropped when I noticed a short stretch of the road had distances marked in km. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why this one bit of road in the middle of nowhere was marked that way.

I was driving on a road somewhere south of Raleigh NC...and my jaw dropped when I noticed a short stretch of the road had distances marked in km. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason as to why this one bit of road in the middle of nowhere was marked that way.

Chances are good that they were set up for some long forgotten metrification campaign. There was a photo shoot and maybe a video produced in cooperation with the state highway department and that was the end of it.

Travel the backroads often enough and you will find all sorts of oddities like these.

The U.S. Military is almost completely metric. They made a great leap when they switched 5 gallon water cans to 20 liters, which were one of the big hold outs. Still weighing aircraft fuel in pounds, and speed limits are miles per hour, but they are moving forwards. At least we only need one tool set now.

The US should have a push for "hard metrication", which means using metric-sized components, to improve exports to the rest of the world. The military and auto industries are already metric. Electronics is mixed; newer components are metric pitch, but there's still a lot of 0.100 pin spacing around. Construction is still mostly inch. This is more important than the units consumers use.

(I restore old Teletype machines from the 1920s, which use inch fasteners, but fine thread; 6-40 instead of 6-32. Those are rare today. Gun parts suppliers still have them, but the selection of lengths and head styles is limited, so matching old parts is tough. On occasion I've had to buy long bolts, cut off the threaded part, and thread the base part myself. Despite this antique stuff, there's no reason that the US should not be routinely using metric screws for almost everything. Outside the US, getting non-metric screws is hard.)

Ten millimetres to the centimetre. Ten centimetres to the decimetre. Ten decimetres to the metre. Ten metres to the decametrr. Ten decametres to the hectameter. Ten hectametres to the kilometer. I now some of these prefixes isn't in common use, but it does show that all you have to do is to mulitply by ten.

Twelve inches to the foot. Three feet to the yard. One thousand, sevenhundred and sixty yards to the mile - or more correct; eight furlongs, each of which is ten chains, each chain is four rods, each of which again is twenty five links. And just to show how well thought out the system is; each link is 7.92 inches long... So you either have a progression of 12-3-1760, or one of 25-4-10-8.

To quote the AC that got modded down: "How exactly are inch and the foot are more practical units for everyday use? cm and meter are used all around the world everyday and there's no problems with them."

Centimetres and metres are extremely practical for everyday use, as proven by the fact that most of the world use them without trouble on a day to day basis. And before you come up with the old and busted idea that you can't easily divide by three in the metric system - or at least not get a nice, round number - try telling me just how many inches a fifth of a foot is.. or a fifth of a yard.

Metrics are easier to explain, lets you convert between units easier and makes for simpler maths. The so called Standard measures do not.

That, or they said that there is little benefit for the man in the street to convert and there are giant costs involved. So, with little benefit in one hand and a giant cost in the other, what would you do?

You consider the future. Who was it who said "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish"?

The fall from enterprising pioneers to decadent reactionaries went quickly - a mere two generations.

When was the last time you ever had to convert feet to miles, or yards to miles? In general, the US system is good enough.

I use miles-per-hour and miles as a measurement of driving distance.
I use gallons for gas and milk.
milliliters for other liquid measurements (since it's on the bottles, and easy enough to read)
Inches for building things out of wood. 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, and 1/16 are good tolerances in construction.
F for temperature (because 98.6 isn't any worse than 37.0)

We do make buildings using feet and inches which is a nightmare.Suppose you need to put a 2 feet 8 3/8 inch window in the middle of a 4 foot 7 3/16 inch wide wall.How far from the left edge of the wall is the left edge of the window?(I'll leave the math to you.)

I haven't touched imperial in twenty-five years, but when I did, everything was in inches. From 10 metres to 0.02mm, everything was dimensioned in inches. Inches were broken down into thousandths.

I can't even begin to imagine talking in feet and inches. Saying "two feet, eight and three-eighths" it so long compared with "eight-two-two mil" (822mm). Even remembering the dimension while marking out must be an extra pain.

Answer: who cares? You find the center line of the wall and the center line of the window and work off of those. You can do that with two sticks and a pencil. When Norm wants to build things that are identical and repeatable, he doesn't measure each one down to the thousandth. He builds a jig of some kind so that each thing ends up being the same size.

Hehe, a damn good example of the problems of the US or Imperial system.:)
Would it have been a metric system you could have easily and without pen and paper figured out a 0.82 m. window needs 0.29 m. edge to be in the middle of a 1.40 m. wall.

When I worked in construction, I found inches are better than centimeters, because you can specify your tolerances really well. It's really hard to cut a board to a mm precision with a circular handsaw, but no problem to cut it to 1/16 of an inch.

so it is easier to cut it down to 0,15875 cm precision than to 0,1 cm ? surprising:)

You do have to give credit to the (probably illiterate) medieval craftsmen who created the various customary units for often having the intuitive notion that 12 would be a better base for our number system than ten.

However, since unfortunately ten is the base of our number system, dividing units into 12 does more harm than good. You only get the convenience of occasionally splitting things into 3 parts at the expense of having to do complex fraction calculations on most everything else.

I don't think your argument that the American system is more convenient to live in holds. If you talk to people who grew up outside of the US (like me, for example) you will find that they can think as easily in Centigrades and cm as an USAian can think in inches and Fahrenheit. For example, you wouldn't talk about a 2/3m door, but a 70cm door, and people tend to think of room temperature as 20C or 22C. I travel back and forth between Europe and the US quite often and I do not find any practical difference

Do you really want to be able to have a calculator around? When I need to consider units, it is absurdly easy to convert them. Do you realize that the United States does not use the English system? It uses the United States customary units (variations exist between it and the English system). 'Imperial' in fact has no many variations around the world. I think the best reason to change it, is because it is one of only three countries in the world that doesn't use the SI system. For the world to interact with the United States it would be much easier if everyone used SI.

Bad choice of target for your "hurr american cars use old tech" attack. Even the article you link notes that people mistakenly associate the Corvette suspension system with the setup used on trucks just because it has a leaf, even though the operation is completely different.

A better choice would have been the Mustang for its continued use of a solid axle, though even that holds its own against the M3 so it's hard to call it all bad.

The fact it can hold its own against an M3 in any measurement is impressive. The M3 costs OVER DOUBLE what the Mustang GT costs. Even in the UK it costs over 75% more than the cost of buying a mustang and having it shipped in. Then with a few k in bolt-ons you have a Mustang thats going to smoke the M3 in most any real-world situation on the street.

Neither is a race car, but both are good cars. In their own right.

I hate europeans that don't understand the point of a Mustang... it goes fast. It goes fast cheaply. It makes a lovely sound and looks amazing for the price of a base model family sedan. It can be made to go faster than anyone could ever possibly need for under 10k USD.

If we're going to compare Mustang to M3 lets put the GT500 onto a track against it. I'll bet dollars to donuts that the extra horsepower on the GT500 makes up most of the time difference. Because thats what the M3 is. Its in the GT500 price range, and it only MIGHT beat the GT500 around a track(its a might because it will depend on which track, one with a lot of straights the M3 is a bit screwed, and vice-versa for the GT500), even with the SRA, because the GT500 outdoes it on both horsepower and horsepower to weight by a lot.

That said, the 1/4 mile is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 1/4 mile, standing mile, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.

The 1/4 mile is the easiest and fastest way to say "My car beats the pulp out of your car".

Besides that, for the same reason as James May on Top Gear says the Fiat Panda is fun, the Mustang is fun. Cars are most fun when they're driven at the edge of their capabilities. Its due to this that the Mustang with its SRA is more fun than any of the BMW's I've test-driven. The Mustang can be fun on a daily basis, relatively within the legal local speed limits. The M3 is about as boring as it gets until you can get it onto a track somewhere.

That said, the 1/4 mile is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 1/4 mile, standing mile, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.

You mean

That said, the 400 meters is often considered the ultimate test of a car, and I'll mention about the first fucking thing they do on Top Gear UK with very nearly every-single-car they bring on there. If they do a comparison test its always either 400 meters, 1.6km, or 0-100 and back to 0, which are all essentially the same thing.

I did a little fact checking before posting and found that Porsche may have stopped using torsion suspensions in 1989, otherwise I'd be pointing out that Germans use technology that dates back before the Romans (Greeks are known to have discussed torsion in at least some manner), though it wasn't use in transportation suspensions until the 1900s.

For the same reason Microsoft is trying to get everyone off IE6. Because it's bloody annoying and as times goes on it costs more and more just to maintain compatibility.

Almost the entire world has moved to metric. Because the US stubbornly refuses to do so, it makes things that much more difficult and error prone for *any and all* interaction with the US. Costs, if not for any other reason, are a primary factor in this. Extra work done for conversion. Extra work done for testing. Massive quantities of

But it does matter for manufacturers building equipment for markets using the different units.
It should require no explanation conversions between mm, cm, m and km is easier to explain and comprehend than the conversions between 64th, inch, foot, yard and mile.

Alone the need for different tool sets is in my company a serious cost and especially a quality control issue.

What exactly is gained by change in units? As a metric "native" I can tell you that metric units are not based on real-world criteria. There is no way to naturally define an "approximate" centimeter or a gram (as opposed to approximate inch, foot or ounce, for example).

Which is plainly wrong. Every unit was defined to be connected to the Meter (which is why it is called "meter", latin for "measure").
The metric ton for instance was defined as the mass of water in a cube of 1m x 1m x 1m. Thus 1 liter (1 dm) of water weighs weighs 1 kg, and 1 cm of water weighs 1 g.
The meter was defined as the 10 millionth of the distance between Northpole and Equator. Only when the first units of Meter bars were founded and handed over to the national measuring bodies, one found out that there was a small mistake in measurement, and the new meter was about 2 millimeters short. But then it was too late to change that, and the meter was kept.

Irrelevant? If I want to know if it's going to freeze, I just look at the temperature, and if it's below 0C, it's going to freeze. If I boil water, it will start to boil at 100C.
I don't measure my body temperature that often, and I don't feel too cold that often. But I cook my eggs every weekend, and if I have to take care because of freezing rain on the streets, I have to check every day during winter.
So give me 0C and 100C (and I can remember the 273,15 K for 0C, thank you very much), and get lost with

How is division by halves any more clumsy in metric than in fractional measurements?

If I'm measuring something that's 105 mm and I need to halve it, it's pretty easy to know straight away that it's 52.5 mmHow is this any harder to measuring something that's 4 and 3/16 inches and having to find half of that?

Incidentally, something like this was tried [wikipedia.org]. And, of course, it was rejected. There were some technical problems [wikipedia.org] with it, but there's a bigger problem with it: most people don't want to trade a seven day week for a ten day week if that entails no increase in the weekend. Most employers, on the other hand, would be fine with this arrangement. Besides, in spite of all the Culte de la Raison business, there's nothing more inherently rational about a ten day week than a seven day week.